Iron Mountain ski jump

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

SIMULATING FORWARD, UNDERSTANDING BACKWARD

Michio Koku is to physical
and biological sciences what Malcolm Gladwell is to social sciences.

In books like Tipping Point and Outliers, Gladwell takes all the research of psychology and
sociology and makes it understandable for common folk, including me. From him
we learn things like “the ten thousand hours rule,” that it takes ten thousand
hours of doing something, like the Beetles playing music or Bill Gates
experimenting with computers, before we become truly proficient at it.

Koku does the same for
physics in books like Physics of the
Future and Einstein’s Cosmos, and
especially for brain science/research in The
Future of the Mind.

There is no totally
accepted definition of “mind,” but Koku makes a good stab at it by saying that
human consciousness is the ability to simulate the future.

That ability is not an
unmixed blessing. The ability to simulate the future is how we “awfulize,” imagining
all the awful things that might happen to us in the future. But it is what
separates us from other species and makes us able to survive, even though we
are not as resilient as cock roaches nor as fierce as tigers.

It is also what allows us
to believe in resurrection, a life beyond this life. Our brains are far from
developed enough to simulate what that future might be like, so we have to make
so with a replication of current life, only better. For instance, heaven has
streets, but they are made of gold. In the spiritual reality of heaven, it is
unlikely there will be either streets or gold, but that is the only language we
have. Our ability to simulate the future goes only so far.

We don’t have to go any
further than we can, though. Theologian Eugen Rosenstock-Heusey reminds us that
Easter is about understanding God’s story backward, not forward. We look at the
resurrection of Easter and only then understand all that led up to it. It’s an
“ah ha” moment; so this is what THIS LIFE is all about, living the Jesus life,
the life of resurrection even before resurrection!

John
Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The
“place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula [The UP], where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This
phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]